Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Monday, May 28, 2007

In Which Abba Embraces the San Francisco Giants' Bullpen

Can you hear the
boos...Armando?
I remember long ago, another starry night game lit,
In the towers' light...Armando.
You were mumbling to yourself and softly shaking off Molina;
I could hear the ringing bats
And sounds of razzing fans were coming from between us.

They were closing on our lead...Armando.
Every out, every pitch seemed to last eternally.
I was so aghast...Armando
We were young and full of life and none of us prepared to lose.
And now I am surprised to hear
Opponents' bats and runners lit our fuse.ABBA,
"Armando" (1976)

In large organizations, criticism accumulates to people I call
"lightning rods", or, sometimes a related species, "sh*t
magnets". Once people start getting blamed for failures, it becomes easier
to attach blame to them even when they are only partially to blame or perfectly
innocent. A strong organization will face this head on and determine if the
lightning rod's actual conduct is culpable. If not, they will fight this tooth
and nail...not just because losing a good performer to a blame campaign is
costly, but because once people can scapegoat someone without serious
responsibility, it is likely to happen again and again and get ingrained as a
norm.

Accountability is the fuel of effectiveness; lack of it fuels
ineffectiveness.

So when Swedish Disco's fave closer, Armando Benitez, came into a clean 9th
in a tie game last Friday against the Colorado Rockies, poured gasoline on
hisself and lit it in the form of three hits and a walk and an "L" for
both the Giants & Benitez, the booing was stentorian. Giants fans were
already hypersenstive to Armando's legendary inconsistency (well, he is
consistent in that every season he's pitched, he's thrown more pitches per three
outs than average, even in some remarkably "effective" years). The
booing went up a notch the next day when in the San
Francisco Chronicle Armando was quoted nipping at his teammates.

Moreover, the ticket-holders might not be
happy to hear that the closer rendered himself blameless.

"I did my job," he said when
asked if it was tough to give up two runs when he was not hit particularly
hard. "I got three groundballs. It happens. We had opportunities to win
the game. How many times did we get somebody on base and we don't move him
over? Somebody had to pay and today it was me."

Armando Benitez walked out of the dugout to
do his turn around the Photo Day circle, and was booed by the people wielding
the cameras.

It wasn't a universal boo, not like Friday
night. There were some cheers as well from the true believers who worship the
shirt and all who wear it, but it was a fairly striking juxtaposition --
"Boo! You suck! Now stand here so we can take your picture." The
American Fan Experience in all its mutant beauty.

But credit where it is due, and all that,
for Benitez tipped his hat anyway, and spent 35 minutes circling the rope and
accepting any and all lenses pointed his way. He knew many of the people on
the field openly reviled him the night before, and plenty of times before
that.

Plus, he had chosen the wrong time to haul
out his image-suicidal "I did my job" defense -- a 5-3 defeat in
which he gave up the go-ahead runs in the ninth. He complained that the Giant
hitters didn't make enough of their opportunities, pointed out that he had
induced enough ground balls to get out of the inning with no damage, and in
general credited himself with a job well done and delegated blame for all the
jobs undone.

He has done this before, of course, which
is part of the maddening pattern with Benitez.

I both disagree and agree with Ratto. I've snipped out the part of the piece
where he defends Abba's Closer as someone whose done better than a gaggle of
unreviled closers (Mariano
Rivera, for example), and where Giants manager Bruce Bochy defends Armando's
point of view about opportunities squandered.

BEYOND BASEBALL
It's critical when blame is being doled out that it "stick" to the
right persons. That doesn't mean people have to endlessly point out and replay
the video tape every single error, but it does mean showing you care &
trying to make sure in the cases where people did the wrong thing and the
outcome was bad, they understand the link.

Life, of course is not always so clear cut.

¿What happens when the involved staff did the right thing and the
outcome was bad? Or did the wrong thing and the outcome was positive?

The answer is one of the most important of the thousands of lessons Baseball
can bless you with. Because in Baseball and beyond, you can execute the optimal
plan flawlessly and still lose/have a bad outcome. And you can sub-optimize your
approach or execute fumblingly and still win/get a good outcome (for example,
every operating system Microsoft have shipped since Windows 3.1). You have to
come back the next day and still do your best to execute the right process as
flawlessly as the environment permits to have a chance in a competitive
environment.

...AND BACK
So I disagree with Ratto because Armando induced 4 ground balls, three of them
tractable, and the defense didn't convert them into outs. He essentially is
being scapegoated here, he calls it out, but because he's already
hyper-sensitized the fans with "so many" blowups (I'll get back to
that in a sec), they want none of it. And in Baseball's case (Baseball being the
beacon for accountability among North American lines of work), you don't point
out teammates' errors publicly. What's not-done in Baseball isn't fatal to it
because there' so much accountability culture ingrained in every process
and norm that calling out teammates in public is unnecessary...perhaps even
piling it on.

In fact, Abba's fave closer has 9 saves and only 1 blown save. Opponents are
batting .246 against him with a .316 on-base and a .369 slugging; better than
adequate And the ugliest situations that can be hidden (when a reliever inherits
runners for which his actions can allow to score without being on his own
record), he has been in four games where he inherited runners and the team has
gone 3-1 in those games.

I have a simple/simplistic way of evaluating relief appearances for
thumbnail purposes: If a reliever yields 1 or fewer non-homer
baserunners per inning, that's a "good" outing, and it's a
"frustrating" one when it's more than that. Using that as a
standard, Armando has eight "good" and ten
"frustrating" ones.

Even when he's induced ground balls (for example, the stretch of April
20-24 inclusive and that game on May 25) with runners he's put on, he
hasn't had a double play turned behind him (frustrating for the fans,
and Armando, too, methinks)

These are not significantly awful marks. But they do increase the fans'
frustration factor, especially fickle ones'.

So here's my conclusion and why I find myself as a management consultant
agreeing with The Ratto: If Armando wants to embrace process in the face of bad
outcomes, he needs to have attached to him the barnacles of infinite doom a
la
Bootstrap Bill, when he has good outcomes in spite of bad process.

NOTE: I may be a little extra sensitive about this particular reliever since
he pitched for my home team part of one season, and I saw every single game in
which he blew up. And probably further sensitive because in 1991 or 1992, I went
with and old Baseball man, Bill McCarthy (he'd worked in the Reds' system long
enough & long enough ago ago to have worked with Rogers Hornsby -- and
watched a game with Cy Young) to Jack Lang Stadium for a Spring Training tussle
between two of my favorite talent-development teams...the Orioles and the
Cardinals. The Orioles had this monster-sized pitcher with great posture and
demeanor who threw incredibly hard and seemed to have some control, a lot for
the pre-20 years under his belt. When I looked up the giant's name, I realized I
couldn't wait to see Armando Benitez pitch in the majors. Bill told me I was
crazy and that the kid would break my heart, and when I asked why he couldn't
put it into words...he just told me the kid was going to be a heartbreaker. I
was hemi-semi-demi right; he was almost completely right.

...AND BEYOND AGAIN
It's critical in a competitive endeavor to manage "blame" & crush
scapegoating, and Baseball's insistence on accountability is essential. But so
is Baseball's wisdom about looking beyond pure outcome to try to assure that
good process is continually reinforced regardless of outcome.

That's what Abba was singing about so presciently in 1976.

5/28/2007 08:18:00 PM posted by j @ 5/28/2007 08:18:00 PM

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Book Review: In Whichthe SnarkMeistersinger Meets the Bulldog

Derek Zumsteg, the master of GenY Snark, has a new book out, his first as a
solo author. The top line: It's a great summer read, the kind of bagatelle you
take to the beach and relax with.

The book is The
Cheater's Guide to Baseball. It's an easy-reading 272 page tour of 15
"cheating" topics ranging from the accepted but technically unethical
(sign-stealing, for example) to the Just Plain Wrong to Everyone But Pete
Rose (for example, gambling on baseball when you're a player or manager). The
tone is classic Zumteg, edgy humor concatenated with a numerate appreciation for
informed statistics and analysis, enough references to beer to make you fail a
breathalyzer test from the contact wooze, and expressions of snarky attitude
about the world (and himself). Ironically, though, it's at its most engaging and
Derek's at his best when he's covering the most serious topics. His sections on
chemical supplements (what I call the Baseball in Steroids issue) and on the
sections on Pete Rose and The Black Sox, the two most egregious scandals that
ever surfaced in baseball history, are important work. Others have covered a
single one of those three subjects as well as Zumsteg, but no one has put
together terse, reasonable, eminently readable and informed descriptions of all
three in one place.

IMNSHO, the most serious topics are where Zumsteg's background and
appreciation for understanding and presenting baseball history is where the book
excels. In lighter sections such as Heckling and Doctoring the Ball, the
gravitational field that pulls edgy humor over into the "sophomoric"
zone seems stronger, and for a summer bagatelle this isn't fatal (I know how to
skim snarky sidebars), but it did reduce some of my appreciation of the work.

And I think it's the bleeding into sophomoric humor that won this book its
most widely-published pushback, a
mildly-negative review of it by one of my favorite authors, former Yankee
and Braves pitcher Jim Bouton, in the New York Times Book
Review on April 1.

I'm sure the editor at the NYTBR thought she had a stroke of genius when she
chose Bouton, master of edgy humor about Baseball, as the reviewer for Zumsteg's
seemingly analogous tome. Maybe it was, but the reviewer left a couple of
stigmata on the author she probably didn't anticipate. As an anthropologist, I'm
not surprised, because one generation's edgy humor is another's bad taste or
dead rat bounce. I think more than anything else, generational difference left
baby boomer Bouton unimpressed by Zumsteg's work, and the lack of enthusiasm was
juiced by what I imagine Bouton saw as a lack of respect for the game. In his
own work, Bouton aimed his muckraking at individuals who, he believed, were too
ignorant or sloppy or self-indulgent to show the institution the respect it
deserved. I'm not sure Derek doesn't share Bouton's respect, but the author's
tone might make it look to a reader like disrespect, especially in the lighter
chapters. I wish I could perform a little thought experiment...go back in time
and give Bouton only the three serious sections I mentioned earlier; I suspect
the ex-pitcher would have been a lot more positive.

But there it is: an entertaining summer bagatelle that (strangely enough) excels when it's being
the most serious, The Cheater's Guide to Baseball is a bit of an outlier,
but one I'll end up keeping in my library to loan to people who don't
"get" the supplements issues or why Pete Rose isn't in the Hall of
Fame.

5/19/2007 02:30:00 PM posted by j @ 5/19/2007 02:30:00 PM

Sunday, May 06, 2007

A Cardinals' Lesson in Finding the Right Enforcement Balance

At work, we managers have in our heads an "ideal" set of behaviors
we seek in the staff and peers we work with. And more often than not, some of
our roster misses that ideal in a way or five.

When team-members' effectiveness is the key determinant of
organizational success, that is, when the organization is in a very competitive
arena or The Talent Is The Product (or like Baseball, both of those) we have to
trade off their high individual performance against the way their missing our
definition of ideal undermines the team's ability to perform at a high level.

If the part of our ideal they're failing to meet is cosmetic, and if the
individual truly is a high-performer, then it's an easy call -- you let it go
and let the player find her own way as long as she can do it without degrading
the belief other team members have about the desirability of people achieving
the ideal. It's an easy call if it's a critical shortcoming and the player is a
marginal performer -- you know what I'm going to say. The in-betweens are tough,
but I'll tell you you're likely to have the best overall performance if you keep
communicating (a) what the ideal is, (b) why it's important and (c) how to
achieve it.

But no matter how much you'd like to, you can't effectively police every behavior every
team member has. And insofar as your players have issues that seem more personal
than workplace-related, you'll undermine yourself more than you'll burnish your
productivity if you invest too much energy in policing. And if you don't find a
way to contain that more-personal behavior, you risk some serious consequences.
There's the management challenge, one the St. Louis Cardinals ran into when
their relief pitcher Josh
Hancock died in an
ugly SUV-wreck while driving while talking on a cell phone while drunk a
week ago.

The Cards, like 28 of the 29 other major league teams served (past tense:
they changed that policy) post-game beer in their clubhouse. And allegedly
Hancock was known as a late-night party fellow, and they'd reprimanded him
just a few days before the wreck for oversleeping and being late as the result
of a hangover. But clubhouse beer wasn't in his system when he met his death six
hours after he left the stadium; it was apparently vodka served at a restaurant.
And from a workplace management point of view, it's important to note he wasn't
noticed by management on that day or any others as being drunk at his job. So on
the one hand, the team coulda/shoulda had hints of his off-workhours behavior,
and they had definite knowledge of a single off-work incident which did affect
his work.

¿What should they have done?

BEYOND BASEBALL
Back when I managed a test lab, I had a pair of employees who came in early and
stayed late and took long lunches. A co-worker of theirs reported to me they
were using their midday meal break to drive over to a park a mile or so away and
there smoke funny cigarettes (if you know what I mean and I think you do). The
company we worked for had a rudimentary form of employee assistance program, a
service people with personal life issues (such as mental health challenges or
substance abuse problems); on the other hand, my boss liked to screw with
people for fun (he'd fired a top contributor for not figuring out a way to get
dismissed from jury duty).

The "evidence" was a rumor. One of the two was a very-high
productivity contributor, virtually irreplaceable. The other was good not great,
a bit abrasive, but always willing to help out a peer and had some skills we
didn't have elsewhere on the team. Neither had what a high-expectation manager
like I am would call a performance problem.

I started trying to track their time and determine if their afternoon/evening
productivity was lower than their morning. I was able to determine there was
little difference in output and yes, they did take really long lunches though,
yes, each did work well over 40 hours a week. I couldn't smell any telltale
incense on them (for reasons you'd never guess, I knew what funny cigarette
smoke smelled like).

My basic operational belief, and what I try to make clear to my workgroup is
this:

Each person is responsible for self-discipline,

Whenever a staffer notices another worker's non
work-affecting problem, it's best to deal with it directly; if it's a
work-affecting problem talk to the person with the problem before taking
it upstairs...after all if it's affecting the team's performance, it's
affecting all the team members' worklife.

If the problem persists, take it upstairs.

In that case, I decided not to intervene personally. I asked the co-worker to
talk to them about it to salve her concern and to urge them to keep any
recreational substances off-premises. But I realized that neither was a
performance problem, and if they were doing it on work hours, it wasn't
at work or on our time. I had no evidence. And having the boss breathing down
your neck for non work-related issues, especially when you're producing, is a
booger.

It became a worse booger when in the year after I left the lab, the good not
great staffer had a serious nervous breakdown at work, allegedly triggered by
some hard drugs. If I had interceded against my better judgement, would it have
changed the trajectory of his work life?

In the end, I'm culturally too American to easily meddle in the personal
lives of better-than-adequate level staff or peers I work with, and Cardinal GM
Walt Jocketty was quoted in a way that it sounds like he shares my management
tendency.

"There's a lot of guys who like to
have a cocktail now and then, and maybe some
more than others," Jocketty said. "But unless you go out and
socialize with the
guys, which I don't, how are you going to know? … It's not like we police
these
guys away from the ballpark," Jocketty said. "It's up to them to
police
themselves."

{SNIP} Jocketty said he has inquired further
about Hancock's habits since Sunday's
accident.

"I've now talked to two guys who said
they talked to him about (his drinking)
from time to time, but I don't know how much they knew," Jocketty said.
" …
These guys are grown men. They have to know how to conduct themselves."

{SNIP} Jocketty said the club may further address the issue after attending a
Thursday memorial for Hancock in Tupelo, Miss. "I've talked individually to guys about making sure they don't have
any more problems," Jocketty said Tuesday.

When people have personal demons that don't seem to affect their work life,
the most effective policing system is team-mates' intervention. They have a
stake in the outcome, and they have leverage "the bosses" don't (see
Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development, Stage
Three).

As managers though, that doesn't free us from responsibility or action. If
Hancock did have persistent enough problems that, as Jocketty heard, some
teammates were talking with him about it, teammates should have brought it to
the GM's attention earlier, and it would have been his burden to carry, his
mandate to try to get the player some help. It's our job to not make staffers lives worse, but we're management, not parents and there's no perfect always-right
answer for most organizations.